18th Century Babywearing
Babywearing – primarily on the mother’s back, but sometimes in the form of other baby slings – tends only to appear when the mother seems to be in the middle of walking for a significant distance. In England and western Europe, this tends to be more frequently seen with poor women (such as beggars and camp followers), but babywearing appears in illustrations from other cultures in the 18th century as well.
War Scene by Sebastiaen Vrancx, 17th century
Cries of London: The London Beggar, c. 1688
Eh mon mary, point tant de vanité (Ah, my husband, do not be so vain. Without the dragoons and the monks you would hardly have a family) and Mon poupart ne m'empeche pas de travailler En ville (My baby does not stop me from working in the city) from a series of watercolors by Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, c. 1740-1775
The Industrious 'Prentice out of his Time, & Married to his Master's Daughter by William Hogarth, 1747
The March of the Guards to Finchley by William Hogarth, c. 1749-1750
Crippled soldier with family, c. 1760
The young gipsy, 1762
Rural view from a collection of prints, including a man with a staff and a woman with a baby on her back walking in the foreground, 1763
A soldier’s wife begging by Daniel Chodowiecki, 1764
Group of refugees by Johann Conrad Seekatz
A beggar woman carrying a baby on her back, 1769
The Country Maids Fortune Told, 1772
Returng from Reading Market in a full breese, 1773
Six-pence a day, 1775
The Disbanded Soldier. So shall Desert in Arms be crown’d., 1775
Collection of costumes from Spain: peasant woman from the mountains near Burgos, with a baby carrier on her back, 1777
An elderly travelling beggar who carries his young wife on his back; she carries a child on her back and a basket on her head, c. 1780-1790
A peasant woman standing, carrying a child on her back and another in her arms, c. 1780-1839
A Collection of Etchings after the Most Eminent Masters of the Dutch and Flemish Schools: a man with a baby tied on his back, c. 1782-1803
The Gypsie Fortune-Teller, 1783
A Woman of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1784
A woman carrying a baby strapped to her back holds out her hand to lead two little girls away from a seated woman, c. 1785-1840
View of the Eagle Tower at Caernarvon, including a woman who carries a child on her back while she knits, 1786
The Jovial Crew or Merry Beggars: A comic opera as performed at Brighton by the Carleton Company, 1786
A ballad-seller, 1790s
He would be a soldier, or the history of John Bulls warlike expedition, 1793
A Tatar Boatwoman from an album of 82 drawings of China by William Alexander, 1793-1796
Sir Roger de Coverley and the Gypsies by Thomas Stothard, late 18th century or early 19th century
McCord Museum M187, an Iroquois cradleboard, c. 1800-1830
Country Woman in Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the English
Portrait of Mrs. Gwyn, Alc Rolls’ nurse by George O. Delamotte
Scottish Peasant Women by James Ward